tradition of civil discourse symbolized by the New England town hall and the Virginia House of Burgesses was considered by our founders to be the key to holding government accountable.
Whether our unity breaks down in this era of heightened partisanship will depend less on the degree of differences than on the way we talk to one another and our capacity for mature, productive and responsible debate.
When historians eventually review the past several decades, the increasingly hostile and ad hominem tone of national politics will, I suspect, be much commented upon. It will not be viewed as near as polarizing as that which led to the Civil War. But as understandable as citizen angst may be today, the anger and name-calling that plague our political dialogues will be seen as unnecessarily damaging to our social cohesion. We undercut an essential component of democracy when citizens and public figures label each other “fascist” and “communist” in manifest disregard of what these words mean, and in implicit disrespect of the sacrifices that millions of Americans made to thwart totalitarian states tied to these creeds.
Citizenship is hard because it is both a privilege and a responsibility. If all men are created equal, it follows that all have something to contribute to a public dialogue. Every citizen has a right not only to speak but to be heard.
The same, by analogy, is true of other nations. How we lead—or fail to lead—in an ever more interdependent global community will be directly related to how we comprehend our own history, values, and diversity of experiences, and how deeply we come to understand other peoples and their societies. If we don’t try to understand and respect others, how can we expect them to respect us, our values and our way of life?
As we engage with terrorists half way around the Earth and look back at a century hallmarked by the first world wars in history and mankind’s vilest Holocaust; as we look at the senseless brutality of Pol Pot’s Cambodia and tribal animosities in Rwanda; and as we review the sporadic hate crimes in our own country, it is self-evident that suspicion, sometimes even fear, of the different is a weakness of the human condition.
One might ask what problem is there with a bit of public hyperbole. Plenty. The logic is the message. When a polarizing vocabulary of animus takes public hold and “prejudice” and its twin—“hate”—become commonly accepted, society becomes vulnerable to violence and social instability. Certain frameworks of thought define rival ideas. Other frameworks describe enemies. If we fought a civil war to emancipate a people and preserve the union, if
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